Michael Winterbottom Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I've never read Laurence Sterne's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman," and apparently, that's no small feat anyhow. After all, Sterne's protagonist starts out just before his birth and spends his time describing so many tangents of his existence that the book ends by the time his life has barely begun.

But I was delighted by the approach with which director Michael Winterbottom and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce adapted the seemingly unfilmable novel -- by making a movie about making the movie, which itself never quite gets around to unfolding. Steve Coogan plays a version of himself who's trying to keep his supporting actor/co-lead down and his girlfriend and newborn happy, in addition to juggling the production and the press and the pressures that come with the shoot as a whole.

It's all so delightfully twisty and sly, and I suspect that it's very much keeping in spirit with Sterne's work. I'm not sure that I could pick one favorite scene (actually, maybe the bit where an exceptionally perky Gillian Anderson gets hired), but YouTube has cut my work out for me. There's only one full scene I can embed here, but it's as much a doozy as most, as Coogan acts like he's coping with a hot chestnut in his trousers, only to then try it with an actual hot chestnut (or did he?).

As for the entire movie -- which also stars Dylan Moran, Kelly Macdonald, Stephen Fry, Jeremy Northam, and Naomie Harris -- at least I can promise it'll only run about ninety minutes. Talk about making a long story short....

Watch the video after the jump

Hold up. No one told me about the adaptation of Jim Thompson's classic The Killer Inside Me. A true '50s noir, Thompson's book is a bite-your-nails tale about a Texas sheriff's deputy who is also the town murderer. He's calm and cool on the outside and a brutal killer on the inside. And yes, it's also a song by MC 900 FT Jesus.

I'm down with that, since the younger and less chinny Affleck proved his chops in Gone Baby Gone and The Assassination of Jesse Ford by the Coward Robert Ford, although IMDb pro also lists him as the director of "Untitled Joaquin Phoenix Documentary," so we've got him to thank for that sh*tshow. Bill Pullman and awesomely creepy Elias Koteas (Crash) also star.

On the other hand, the rest of the cast is a uneven, and this particular adaptation has quite the long back story. Kate Hudson plays Lou's good-girl girlfriend Amy Stanton, while Jessica Alba is Joyce Lakeland, a prostitute who digs Lou's ugly side. And then there's Simon Baker, star of TV's "The Mentalist" and films like Sex and Death 101 and The Devil Wears Prada, Something New, Land of the Dead, and The Ring Two, as the small-town lawyer out to get Lou.

You know, I'm not trying to be crude, but if your average small town prostitute looked anything like Jessica Alba, the world's oldest profession could probably give the modeling industry a run for its money. Variety reports that Alba has signed to play a small town hooker in Michael Winterbottom's noir thriller, The Killer Inside Me.

Killer is based on the novel by Jim Thompson, and Robert Weinbach and John Curran (The Painted Veil) have already written the adaptation. Back in 1976, Stacy Keach had starred in a feature film version of the novel about "a West Texas sheriff and his downward spiral from a boring small-town cop into a ruthless, sociopathic murderer." This time Casey Affleck will pick up where Keach left off as the sheriff, and Alba will play the role of a small town hooker. Now to be fair, I'm trying really hard not to think back to all those interviews where Alba turned her nose up at roles that traded on her sexuality; you know, like playing hookers....or strippers.

Killer is just the latest in Alba's crusade to finally be taken seriously as an actress, and frankly, she could use the help. Between her last summer flop, The Love Guru, and lackluster reviews for her work in Awake and The Eye, it's not like great parts are being offered left and right. Hopefully Killer will change all that, because if the career trajectory of your average starlet has taught us anything, it's that playing a hooker is usually one of the first steps on the road to being an actor with a capital 'A'. Well, that and looking unattractive, but I guess that's what her upcoming role in An Invisible Sign of My Own is for.

Here's a movie that deals with death and grief without hysterics, dramatic speeches or showy, Oscar-grubbing performances. Michael Winterbottom's Genova has a logline that sounds maudlin and turgid – after she inadvertently causes a car accident that kills her mother, a young girl starts seeing mom's ghost – but the movie turns out to be understated, down-to-earth, quietly sad. This is Winterbottom's most intimate film since 9 Songs, and one of the highlights of his career.

Genova has the wherewithal to show its characters dealing with loss in ways that aren't inherently cinematic. It would have been very striking, for example, to have the newly motherless children – the teenage Kelly (Willa Holland) and the preteen Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) – scream, rage at the world, and slam doors in the face of their well-intentioned father Joe (Colin Firth) before concluding that Family Sticks Together. And in a film like this, I would have guessed that Joe would spiral into an alcoholic depression, or perhaps start a tumultuous, guilt-ridden affair with the old college friend (Catherine Keener) who comes back into his life.

Those are the arcs I would have expected to see. But though a couple doors do get slammed, Winterbottom's characters aren't here to amuse us or push our buttons. Their reactions to the tragedy and their ways of adjusting to a new life in the titular city all paint a much more nuanced picture – and the effect is more heartbreaking than any number of manipulative stunts could have achieved.

On the heels of some high-profile NYFF announcements, the Toronto International Film Festival has unveiled its fair share of titles scheduled to premiere there next month. According to Variety, the list includes:

• The North American premieres of Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York (pictured), which has been picked up for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics since we last heard of (still) possible trims, and Steven Soderbergh's epic Che, which remains without a distributor -- James Rocchi reviewed both films at Cannes.
  
• The world premieres of Rian Johnson's Brick follow-up, The Brothers Bloom, which looks to be a special sort of con movie, and Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno, which looks to be a special sort of, well, romantic comedy.
  
• The North American premieres of Darren Aronofsky's sports drama The Wrestler and Gavin O'Connor's oft-delayed cop drama Pride and Glory .
  
• The world premieres of Genova, Slumdog Millionaire and Me and Orson Welles, the latest from the ever-unpredictable likes of Michael Winterbottom, Danny Boyle and Richard Linklater, respectively.

Cinematical will bring you early reviews on as many of these as we can, so stay tuned. TIFF runs from September 4th through the 13th.

John Orloff got his break writing two episodes of the Emmy-winning HBO mini-series Band of Brothers. His latest script is another true-life tale -- Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, just out on DVD. Heart focuses on Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie), a reporter whose husband Daniel, an American journalist, was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan. The script just earned Orloff an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Screenplay. The awards will be held on February 23rd.

Cinematical: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

John Orloff: I still don't know whether I want to be a writer! I went to UCLA Film School, and I had a great writing teacher who thought I had a particular skill in that department. So I kept taking that teacher for the whole time I was at UCLA, kept on writing. At the end of it I was 22, it was the late 80s, and people weren't really hiring young writers, so I started to work in advertising. Spent about ten years miserably working in commercials, until I met a woman -- who is now my wife -- who was working in the business as a development exec at HBO. And she was bringing home all these screenplays, and they were horrible! Just awful! And these people had agents, and they were working. So I pitched my wife a non-fiction movie that I had been thinking about writing for ten years, with the incredibly commercial idea of a sixteenth century English melodrama. It was actually about the Shakespeare authorship issue -- who wrote the plays? I wrote the script and had the misfortune of writing it two months before Shakespeare in Love came out. But I sent out this script, trying to get an agent, and did finally get "hip-pocketed" by an agency.

Cinematical: And that script eventually got you your big break with Tom Hanks -- pretty decent guy to start out with, no?

JO: Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, yes! The most important thing that happened out of the Shakespeare script was that Tom's company was among the readers. They liked it, and I met with Tom about another project, but every time I sat down with him I would ask if he had hired writers on Band of Brothers. I'm a huge World War II buff, and I think I eventually just wore him down. He finally asked me to write a script, and I wrote one episode. He was very happy with it and asked me to write another. So, that was my first paying gig.

When it comes time to nominate the best actress performances of 2007, Angelina Jolie might be overlooked. Though the film is at times confusing as it rushes to release all the facts without much of an explanation, it's Jolie's take on the real-life widow of slain journalist Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman), Mariane Pearl, that ultimately lifts A Mighty Heart up above some of the other "based on a true story" flicks that have hit screens in the past year. Featured in practically every scene of the film, it's hard to take your eyes off Jolie -- and it's hard not to lose yourself in the character, the real-life woman, who spent weeks holed up in a house awaiting word on her kidnapped husband while doing what she could to track him down herself.

By now, we all know the story and the outcome: On January 23, 2002, Daniel Pearl, a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped in Kirachi, Pakistan while heading to what he thought was an interview with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani at the Village restaurant in Kirachi. At some point he was intercepted by a militant group calling themselves The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, and for the next month, a group of people (including Pearl's wife Mariane, his friend Asra, a Pakistani Captain, the FBI and others) use the house they were staying at as a make-shift headquarters as they attempt to hunt down the men responsible and find Danny before it's too late.

Even with a big star like Angelina Jolie, A Mighty Heart is not performing too well at the box office (less than $8 million in two weeks). For most releases, such disappointment would signal the end of a theatrical run. However, instead of pulling the film completely and hoping for better business on video, Paramount Vantage is attempting to jumpstart its battery. This weekend the studio is removing A Mighty Heart from many of its screens, dropping its theater count from 1,350 down to 651. Basically the film has been taken out of markets it isn't doing so well in; now maybe the buzz will grow in stronger areas and later the film can go back to a wider release. Even in the limited release, though, the film is bound to face strong competition from other well-received indies like Sicko, Once and La Vie en rose. Still, Paramount Vantage is going to really push this one in hopes that it will eventually find its audience. Paramount is also pushing for a heavy awards campaign for A Mighty Heart, and so it probably wants the slow buildup and long run kind of success that Crash achieved two years ago. The studio is still planning for the film's DVD to come out in time for Oscar voters.

I still haven't seen A Mighty Heart, but I had planned on going last night. Unfortunately, my local theater didn't have a showtime between 5:15pm and 10:30pm because it shares a screen with La Vie en rose (it seems Transformers is hogging most of the screens, even in NYC). So, instead I finally saw Knocked Up. Because I'm such a tardy moviegoer, I have to appreciate strategies where a movie is allowed long-term play. I still need to see Sicko and La Vie en rose and Once and many others that will hopefully be around for awhile. If only more distributors could recognize people like me who don't contribute to opening weekend grosses and would let other well reviewed movies stick around a little longer.

Last week's Manhattan junket for A Mighty Heart was fairly routine -- not at all a paparazzi circus, despite the fact that that press had known days in advance that Angelina Jolie was making the Waldorf Astoria her home base while in town to do publicity for the film. For those who are interested, I was never asked to sign any kind of agreement or contract whatsoever, and none of the other journalists doing roundtable interviews were, either. I think that kind of thing was restricted to journalists doing one on one interviews. The only out-of-the-ordinary thing that happened during the entire day was that the studio publicists made a big show of setting up their own tape recorder to record our conversation with Jolie, for what purpose I have no idea. Anyway, here is a sampling of some of the questions and answers batted back and forth during the roundtables. Some of the questions are mine, some are from the rest of the table. Enjoy.

Angelina Jolie

Playing a character who is not only real but also very involved -- what pressure does that put on you as an actress?

Huge pressure. So much so that I didn't sleep the night before and I questioned myself through the entire process of making this film. I respected her before I met her, when I saw how she handled the situation, just as a viewer watching CNN, and when I met her I discovered what a lovely woman, what a gracious person she is, what a great mom she is, and she's the last person I'd want to disappoint in any way. It was a huge responsibility to not just try to be her in the film, but to be her during the most difficult time of her life and to try to interpret her pain or her love for her husband. She had faith in me, that I would be the right person to do it, and I think without that I would never have taken the role.

What was your first meeting with her like?

Our initial meeting was before the film. We just had a play date. [laughs] The film was very much a second thought in our relationship. She was somebody who I liked as a woman and still think ... we have different things that in common that we want to work on internationally and domestically, and our kids like each other. So that's the most important reason for our friendship -- we get the kids together. It's strange for that to have evolved and for me to sit with her one day and to realize that we were going to do this and I was going to play her. It was strange -- it was very strange. She was wonderful. There's no vanity, and just believed that if everybody understood the book and understood the intention and why she lived her life the way she did, and what she and Danny represented, that if we understood that, then we would do our best and try. And as long as everybody tried their best, that was all she could ask. So she was the nicest person to work with, but because she had faith in us, it also made us that much more nervous.

A Mighty Heart takes an enormous gamble, and sinks or swims by it -- it tries to engage us in a meticulous police procedural, the outcome of which is already known to anyone watching the film. The film begins its action about an hour or so after Wall Street Journal South Asia bureau chief Daniel Pearl leaves his pregnant wife Mariane alone in their Karachi apartment to go to a meeting with a shady figure known as Sheik Gilani, who he suspects may have information on the 'shoe bomber' Richard Reid or may himself be a key terrorist figure. Like Daniel, Mariane is a journalist, and the two of them follow a strict procedure of regular call-ins when the other is off on a dangerous assignment. When Daniel misses one of these check-ins, Mariane springs into action, first reporting him missing to Pakistani authorities and later, to American agencies and the Wall Street Journal. Various players begin to flood into the apartment and the story, each of them taking somber mood cues from the tightly-wound, no-nonsense Mariane.

As Mariane, Angelina Jolie totes around a giant belly and a big pile of hair and sinks into the role of a traffic coordinator, constantly gauging the progress of the ad-hoc investigation into Daniel's disappearance and shuffling the other characters in and out of the main action. Early on, she creates a tree diagram on a blackboard to get a sense of where Daniel was going when he was abducted and who might have knowledge of his whereabouts. Pictures of 'persons of interest' are slapped up and yanked down. The movie demands your full attention as it unspools reams of information: names, places, events, and questions that must be answered if the crime will be foiled. I'm sure this is a true reflection of those sleepless weeks as Mariane Pearl remembered them in her book, but the sheer tonnage of investigative info A Mighty Heart presents us ends up crowding out Mariane and Daniel as people: their habits, their convictions, their unusual way of life. I know as little about those things now as I did before seeing the film.